Nature Notes: Village Voices 2025
A selection of ‘Nature Notes’ from the local monthly magazine, Village Voices, describing the seasonal changes and wildlife in and around Shingle Street on the Suffolk coast.
Village Voices Nature Note: Grass
September 2025
I made several wonderful trips to the vast steppes in southern Russia some years ago when that was still possible. Standing in the steppe there you can see gently waving grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see, and beyond your horizon there are further horizons of yet more. There are grasslands on every continent except the Antarctica, under such names as the African savannah, South American pampas and the American plains as well as these Eurasian steppes. Grass covers over half of the earth’s land surface and it was grass that enabled the first agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago when humans exploited it as food for themselves in the form of grain and as fodder for their domesticated animals. One reason grass is such a successful plant is that it grows from the base not the top, so if it is cropped or mown it can more easily regenerate than most other plants and will grow back up again. The word ‘grass’ itself comes from an ancient Indo-European root meaning ‘to grow’.
Closer to home, there is grass all around you. Or more exactly, grasses. We think of grass as just one thing and we talk of ‘cutting the grass’ or ‘green as grass’; but in fact there are some 10,000 different species of grass worldwide, each with its own characteristics. Here in Shingle Street there are at least a dozen different kinds growing right by the roadside. They have some lovely names. There’s cocksfoot, false oat grass, sheep’s fescue, meadow barley, sea couch, bent, meadow grass and the curiously-named Timothy. This last is apparently so-called after an American farmer of that name who promoted its cultivation in the southern states in the early eighteenth century. Feels to me like a name you might have called a guinea-pig rather than a kind of grass, but there you are.
My favourite name of a local grass, however, is Yorkshire fog. The scientific name is Holcus lanatus and that second term means ‘woolly’, referring to the grass’s soft, billowing look, which may also explain tits English name, conjuring up an image of smoke drifting from northern industrial chimneys. It’s an abundant grass, tolerant of poor soils and wasteland – so much so that it is sometimes thought of as a weed. That’s a cultural term, though, not a botanical one, and is surely misplaced in the case of such a beautiful plant, which is also an important part of our local ecology. For Yorkshire fog is particularly attractive as a food plant to some scarce butterflies like the small skipper and the even rarer wall brown butterfly that bred here until recently. Thank you, Yorkshire.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Here be Dragons
August 2025
One thing we lack in Shingle Street is fresh water, so our small garden ponds can be a real magnet for wildlife. One recent visitor at ours has been a magnificent Emperor Dragonfly, fiercely patrolling this tiny kingdom, as the scientific name Anax Imperator ‘Lord and Ruler’ suggests. As lord of all he surveys, the dragonfly sees a great deal. They have huge compound eyes made up of some 30,000 separate facets or lenses, so they can see objects in all directions simultaneously and with very great precision. They really do have eyes in the back of their heads. The ‘dragon’ in their name, which probably comes from a Greek word denoting sight, suits the dragonfly well since they are ferocious hunters of other insects, including butterflies, which they can seize in the air, manoeuvring at high speed in any of six directions – up and down, left and right, forwards and even backwards. The aerodynamics of dragonfly wings inspired the design of the flight-blades for the first Royal Navy helicopters named ‘The Dragonfly’ and more recently influenced modern drone technology, still catching up with nature’s own exquisite artifice.
We get little blue damselflies over the pond, too. You can tell a damselfly not just from the size and shape – dragonflies being large and bulky, damselflies petite and thin – but from the way damselflies hold their wings tightly folded when resting, rather than open like an aeroplane as dragonflies do. Damselflies also have their eyes touching close together not separated. It’s a gentler, more feminine name, suited to their dainty proportions, but they too are carnivorous, feeding on smaller flying insects. At the other end of the scale there was once a massive prehistoric dragonfly, the Meganeuropsis, about the size of a crow, but we’ve fortunately missed that by about 250 million years.
If you look closely you’ll see that a dragonfly is composed of three parts: a head with those all-seeing bulging eyes, a thorax (body) and an abdomen (tail). The thorax is the engine-room, where the muscles that power these aerial feats are located, while the tail can have a further function. Our visitor was a female and was pausing frequently to insert her long ovipositor (egg-laying tail) into the weeds to eject a stream of eggs that in about three weeks should develop into dragonfly larvae, which will in turn live in the pond for months, gorging on tiny aquatic life and emerging eventually one night as adult dragonflies. Their reign in the skies will only last a couple of months, alas, but these gauzy beauties are emblematic of a sleepy English summer and fleeting dreams of impossible creatures.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: What’s Missing?
July 2025
It’s easier to notice changes when they involve presences rather than absences. We may be very aware of a new person in our community but we can forget that we haven’t seen old so-and-so around for quite some time, now that you mention it. It’s the same with our wildlife. It makes the headline news when charismatic species like red kites, ospreys and white storks are re-introduced into Britain, but how many people realise that in the meantime we’ve lost 70% of our humble house sparrows?
Sparrows used to be one of our commonest birds. From earliest historical times they thrived around human habitations in cities and farms, to the point of becoming pests. We exported them to the USA in the mid-nineteenth century (a few were released in Brooklyn in 1853) and in no time at all they had spread from coast to coast; indeed, by the 1940s there were more sparrows than people in America. And only 30 years ago in Britain they were still as common as, well, sparrows. The ‘Cockney sparrow’ was the affectionate nickname for this small, cheeky little bird living alongside us, with its touch of endearing vulgarity. But there’s been a crash in the population and you can search for them in vain in London now. A friend of mine used to birdwatch in Hyde Park every day and in ten years he never saw a single sparrow. What’s happened?
Scientists have come up with explanations ranging from habitat loss, climate change, improvements in domestic architecture (so fewer nesting holes), growing predator numbers (like magpies and cats), pesticides and air pollution (especially from diesel vehicles); but none of these seems fully convincing or specific to sparrows – why, for example, are there still plenty of sparrows in other big cities like New York and Paris? One more inventive speculation is that house sparrows are essentially social creatures and if the colony size drops below a certain level they can’t any longer function as individuals, especially as they are also extremely sedentary and localised. Sparrows don’t migrate, even short distances, to occupy empty niches elsewhere, so they find it hard to recover from a decline brought on by other factors. Could it be like the human situation in the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda in 1936, when the population had declined to 36 people and they could no longer be self-sufficient so had to be physically evacuated and resettled?
Here in Shingle Street we still have a small colony of house sparrows, I’m glad to say, but they’re getting rarer. Should we be resettling sparrows here as well as kites and storks? Could be an interesting negotiation with an export-minded US president.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Look up, Quick
June 2025
I was taking a stroll on one of those lovely long midsummer evenings, watching the swallows swooping low over the fields for their final feed of the day. They were calling occasionally, a gentle veet veet, which is their standard conversational contact call. But suddenly one gave a much louder, piercing cry and they all instantly scattered as if in a shock-wave and dived for safety. I looked up and knew what I’d see – the sinister dark silhouette of a falcon shearing through the sky. This was the swallow’s special ‘hobby alert’ call.
Most of our common birds of prey – kestrel, sparrow hawk, buzzard, peregrine and red kite – are resident in Britain throughout the year, but we have one that is just a summer visitor, the hobby. Why only in summer? Well, that’s when its favourite prey is available, the swallows, martins and swifts, which it follows here each spring. And it’s the only raptor with the specialist aerial skills to catch them. Swifts and swallows are wonderful fliers themselves, of course, but they are no match for a hunting hobby, which is capable of breath-taking twists and turns at high speed to chase them down on the wing. It’s such a deadly threat that the swallows have evolved this special call as an air-raid warning. Hobbies also take dragonflies in large numbers, which they do with almost nonchalant ease, plucking them from the sky as they cruise along and then nearly stalling in mid-air to strip out the soft bodies and consume them in flight.
Seen close-up, hobbies are very handsome birds with slate-coloured backs, white cheeks, black moustaches and rufous feathered ‘trousers’. But they are quite easy to distinguish in flight, too. Unlike a kestrel they never really hover, but scythe around, alternately soaring and diving on sharply angled wings, rather like huge swifts. They are much smaller than, say, buzzards. Indeed, their Latin name is Falco subbuteo and since a buzzard is a buteo this literally means ‘a falcon one size down from a buzzard’. And herein lies an etymological curiosity. Do you remember the table-football game called Subbuteo, which was very popular in the last century? The inventor of that game, one Peter Adolph, wanted to call it ‘Hobby’, partly because it was a hobby in the other sense of ‘pastime’ and partly because the hobby was his favourite bird. But when in 1948 he tried to register it as a trade-mark under that name, the Patents Office refused him for some reason, so he called it by its Latin name instead and they approved that. A little natural history sometimes helps.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Yellow Bird of Summer
May 2025
Sometimes just a momentary experience can release a whole theatre of memories. Walking a nearby country lane, I glimpsed a flash of yellow atop the hawthorn hedgerow and heard a hoarse jingle that conjured up the seemingly endless summers of childhood. A yellowhammer. The first half of the name is clear enough; while the second half probably comes from the Old English amer, meaning a bunting, so they are really ‘yellow buntings’. The males have brilliant canary-yellow heads in spring, with a paler suffusion on the underparts – to my eye, a much happier blend with the palette of colours in the English countryside than the harsh yellow glare of the rape fields I see beyond. The hoarse song is traditionally rendered as ‘a little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, though it actually sounds more like the less grammatical ‘little-bit-of-bread, cheeeeze’ (a stutter followed by a wheeze). The song isn’t exactly euphonious –Coleridge likened it to someone filing brass – but they will now go on singing this refrain tirelessly until autumn and its repetition would be grating if it wasn’t so evocative of hot summers, dusty roads and healthy hedgerows.
One of the yellowhammer’s old country names was ‘scribble lark’, because their eggs are delicately inscribed with a loose series of wavy lines resembling even worse handwriting than mine. Other regional names invoke different associations. The Welsh name (is melyn yr eithin, meaning ‘yellow bird of the gorse’; while I hesitate to explicate the Scots name yorlin, which Robbie Burns exploited in a double-entendre so coarse that the BBC’s spoken rendering of his poem, ‘The Yellow, Yellow Yorlin’, comes with a trigger-warning …
To recite these scraps of folklore may be thought to view the yellowhammer through a golden haze of nostalgia, however. The countryside is changing. The rape fields whose colour seems garish and alien to me have been with us since the 1980s, so are already a part of a new tradition for others. And one remembers how the nineteenth-century peasant-poet John Clare bitterly lamented the enforced replacement of his familiar open-field landscapes with the very enclosing hedgerows that we in turn seek to preserve and restore. Nonetheless, if the yellowhammer eventually joins the other local casualties of intensive agriculture like the corn bunting, the turtle dove and the tree sparrow, I can’t just view that as an inevitable secular process. I feel these losses as an impoverishment, not just another change. And it’s no consolation to have this diminution of our natural heritage diagnosed in technical Eco-speak as the ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’, whereby each generation adjusts to a new and diminished ‘normal’. What we need is an Ascending Recovery Scale.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Local Knowledge
April 2025
Grass starts growing again at about 10°C (50°F) and you can track the movement of that isotherm across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, a green wave travelling north at about fifty kilometres a day, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth – and a feeling of renewal. Surfing that green wave are our migrant birds, and none bears a greater freight of these associations than the swallow and the swift, arriving here from southern Africa, respectively in mid-April and in early May. I eagerly look out for them at their due dates every year, usually returning faithfully to exactly the same place at the same time. And I get a fizzing shot of adrenaline when I first see and hear them back again. I’m not alone. These two species have been among our traditional spring and summer markers for centuries, welcomed back each year with relief, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the globe’s still working’.
Swallows and swifts were the favourite birds of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, who inspired a new tradition in nature writing in Britain. White was an obscure country curate who lived all his life in the same house in the equally obscure village of Selborne in Hampshire (population about the same as Hollesley). But his account of the daily changes to nature in his village through the seasons, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), became one of the most widely-read books in the English language, still in print today in multiple editions. Its attraction was precisely its parochial focus, stressing the richness of the local, the particular and the familiar – or at least what you thought was familiar until you really looked at it. He urged the importance of deepening one’s knowledge instead of just extending it: ‘Men that only undertake one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with.’ Not in favour of eco-tourism, then!
White was an amateur in its literal sense and he touched a chord with thousands of ordinary people. He also attracted the admiration of such different figures as Charles Darwin, John Constable, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, all of whom remark on the book’sapparently artless simplicity and charm. White had effectively invented a new literary genre and so became the patron saint of today’s many nature diarists. He also kept a daily journal and one of his most striking diary entries is an ecstatic two-word exclamation on 13 April 1768, greeting the first returning swallow to Selborne by its then scientific name:
‘Hirundo domestica !!!‘ (his exclamation marks).
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: the Colour of Spring
March 2025
I’ve just been watching the first butterfly of spring, a lovely yellow brimstone gliding across a sheltered spot in the garden. These are the floatiest of butterflies, like a large leaf pirouetting in a breeze, and their rich buttery hue seems to accentuate their spring freshness. It’s even been suggested that their colour gave ‘butterflies’ their name. Anyway, the sight made me start wondering about possible connections between spring and the colour yellow. We think of spring as the season of greening, but maybe spring makes some of its most important announcements in yellow. After all, a lot of our early spring flowers are yellow, too. The year starts with aconites, gleaming like little golden lanterns through the winter’s undergrowth. We then pretty soon have a succession of primroses, celandines, daffodils, dandelions, coltsfoot and cowslips – all different shades of yellow. Why would that be? One theory is that their bright yellow colour attracts the early pollinators like bees, so these plants get a head start in the work of fertilisation. Nice idea – simple, striking and plausible. It’s the sort of pop scientific knowledge we all like to parade. But hang on, does the logic work? Aren’t there a lot of early flowers that are not yellow – snowdrops, many crocuses, scilla, wood anemone, and so on? And equally, there are lots of yellow flowers that come later – sunflowers, chrysanthemum, corn marigold, tansy, ragwort, mullein and a whole tribe of humble vetches, trefoils, stonecrops and saxifrages. Moreover, gorse displays at least some of its sweet-smelling yellow flowers all the year round – hence the wise saying that when the gorse flowers kissing is in fashion. And anyway, don’t most insects have quite different perceptions of colour from ours, relying much more on the ultra-violet band in the wavelength, so they wouldn’t necessarily see the yellows we see?
Collapse of hypothesis? Not entirely, but it demonstrates that these things are quite complicated. Another thought might be that several of these early yellow flowers like the celandine and buttercup are also very shiny, so maybe they are more reflective of such sunlight as there is early in the year and therefore more attractive to insects for that reason? By contrast, some of the later flowering plants like ragwort have a much duller, matt finish.
Could there be an unlikely clue to the puzzle from taxi-cab design? It’s said that when John Hertz founded his Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1907 he chose that colour because it made his taxis easier to spot at a distance and his customers found it attractive. And now yellow cabs are everywhere in the world. Nature knows best.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: New Moon Bird
February 2025
If asked about their favourite bird songs most people might plump for the skylark, the nightingale, the blackbird or the song thrush. But you could make a strong case for the curlew too. The name is onomatopoeic, of course, referring to its call, a clear liquid curlee, delivered with a rising inflection on the second syllable like a cursive flourish in signing off its name. The call is thrilling enough, especially when a whole flock of them takes off from the marshes in winter chorusing in unison, but the fulll song arouses an even higher level of emotional intensity. It’s a long rippling trill, choreographed in a slow descending ‘air dance’ with the wings held open and raised above the head as if in exultation. It’s a song that has moved poets to almost spiritual responses. Robert Burns wrote, ‘I never heard the solitary whistle of curlews on a summer noon without feeling an elevation of soul’; while
Ted Hughes rhapsodised, ‘Curlews in April hang their harps over the misty valleys…a wet footed god of the horizons.’ They even get a mention in one of our oldest poems, the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, ‘I take my gladness in the… sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men’.
It’s hard to hear this song in East Anglia now, though just a few pairs are still holding out in the Brecks. You have to go to the main breeding grounds on the moors and rough pastures of northern England, Wales and Scotland, where the lonely landscapes render the song even more wild and wonderful. We still get large wintering populations of birds on our coastal marshes and estuaries, however, escaping colder temperatures in northern Europe. They are the largest of our wading birds, the females larger than the males, and they are easily identifiable not only by their voices but by the obvious physical feature of that long decurved bill. The full scientific name of the curlew is Numenius arquata and the first part of that, the generic name, means ‘shaped like the new moon’; while the second part, the specific name, just in case you hadn’t got the point, means ‘bent like a bow’. So this is the ‘new moon’ bird, an image almost as lovely as the song.
Even in their strongholds in the uplands and bogs the number of breeding curlews in Britain and Ireland is declining fast, however – from changes in land use, drainage and reforestation schemes, and predation. They have been put on the Red List of endangered species and there is an admirable charity advocating for their support (Curlew Action – check it out).
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: the Raven’s Return
January 2025
I walked out on one of those dark, dank January days when the countryside seemed drained of colour and was eerily silent, as if muffled by the rising mist. That made all the more dramatic the deep throbbing bass note I suddenly heard as a large dark bird flew purposefully overhead with slow, elastic wing-beats. It called again, a hollow kronk kronk – and I realized I’d just encountered a raven. And now I could also see that in silhouette the bird had the distinctive diamond shaped tail of that species and a huge dagger bill.
Ravens are the largest members of the Corvid family, much bigger than rooks or crows, and even larger than the buzzards we regularly see around now. Up to the nineteenth century ravens used to be common throughout Britain, but they were progressively hunted out in the south and east and until recently you could only see (or hear) them in the wilder parts of Wales and the West Country or in Upland Britain. Indeed, they weren’t that easy to see anywhere, having become very shy and wary of humans – as well they might be. But, like the buzzards, they are now making a comeback and are spreading eastwards again. They’ve been breeding here in Suffolk since 2018 and seem to be re-establishing themselves.
Ravens are basically carrion-eaters – hence that meat-cleaver bill and their sinister associations with death and disaster. Ravens were a familiar sight on battlefields and used to follow armies to feast on the corpses slain in battle, not just in the ancient world but up to at least the time of the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. From this it was an easy step to imagine them as prophets of doom, and maybe that’s why the collective noun for them is ‘an unkindness of ravens’. Ravens could be good omens as well as bad, however. We all know the legend that if the famous ravens long resident in the Tower of London should ever forsake it the kingdom would fall. It turns out, though, that there is no real evidence that ravens were kept there until the 1880s, when the story first appeared in a children’s book.
Myths can be manipulated as well as manufactured, of course. During the Second World War all the Tower birds except one, who was rather sweetly called Pauline, were killed in the bombing raids and their aftermath. So, on Churchill’s instructions the keepers secretly brought in some new ones to keep up the national morale. A patriotic deception.
Anyway, I’ll settle for my raven being a good omen and a welcome return of a native.
Jeremy Mynott